Zumwalt

by Larry Berman

  A Los Angeles Times editorial titled “Zumwalt and the New Navy” took a similar position: “Hicks is wrong. The ultimate question was not ‘permissiveness’ but rather failure of the command structure to carry out Zumwalt’s orders. The ultimate question here is whether there will be a modern Navy, a Navy responsive to the principles of human equality. Only that kind of Navy will attract the best men and women. Nothing is more important to the mission of the Navy than the quality of its personnel. That is why Adm. Zumwalt must succeed.”139

  The Hicks report was released on January 2, 1973.140 In some ways, the report was as harsh an indictment as could have been issued within the norms of congressional propriety. After fifty-six witnesses and 2,500 pages of executive-session testimony, including two contentious sessions with the CNO, to no one’s surprise, the committee’s final report identified the “permissiveness” of recent reforms as the cause of unrest. The committee’s investigation revealed prejudgment and preconception from the outset. “The United States Navy is now confronted with pressures, both from within and without, which, if not controlled, will surely destroy its enviable tradition of discipline.” The committee warned that the “environment of leniency, appeasement and permissiveness” enhanced chances for mutinous acts and brought about “an alarming frequency of successful acts of sabotage and apparent sabotage on a wide variety of ships and stations within the Navy. . . . If discipline collapses, a military force becomes a leaderless, uniformed mob, capable only of accomplishing its own destruction.”

  From the very beginning, the hearings had been structured to obtain this foreordained result. An unedited version of the transcript showed Chairman Hicks saying, “We are going to do the very best we can to make a fair conclusion based on the evidence, as it appears to us.” And so they did.141 The issue of disciplinary laxity throughout the navy became the primary focus, even though the investigation was triggered by racial incidents on only 3 of the navy’s 650 ships. The committee had its tentative conclusions and then went in search of the facts to support them. On the other hand, the navy was asked to prove that permissiveness had not caused the riots. Witness after witness, through a tangle of badgering and leading questions, was directed toward the committee’s conclusions—discipline was deteriorating; permissiveness prevailed; authority had been diluted; the chain of command had been ignored; blacks wanted special treatment; and there was no racial discrimination.

  The conclusions of the report were often cloaked in innuendo. For example, the committee report noted that the Constellation and Kitty Hawk incidents “might be characterized as mutinies.” They might also be characterized as riots, assaults, or disobedience of orders. In its first so-called finding of fact, the committee stated that permissiveness existed in the navy and could be servicewide. The committee reached its conclusion about blacks not perceiving racial discrimination on the Kitty Hawk without interviewing a single black crew member. With respect to the Constellation, perception of discrimination was conceded, but the committee concluded that several of these perceptions were not accurate. The committee concluded that the human relations councils manned solely by minority personnel were used to bypass the chain of command and were disruptive to good order and discipline. This racist point somehow suggested that if whites had been on the councils, they would have been improved.

  Astonishingly, even the White House ended up seeing the matter more clearly than the committee. In a “No Eyes” memo to President Nixon, William Timmons, the White House staffer tasked with the evaluation, observed,

  The early fear that the Subcommittee was a “hanging jury” seems to have been justified. Committee staffers report that it was “adopted” and fed by a number of retired senior officers who have been broadly opposed to Zumwalt and his reforms on “beards, beer and broads.” The report reads as if it were guided by a priori conclusions. The sweeping generalizations drawn from the two cases are simply not supported by the evidence. . . . To say as the report does that there is no racial discrimination in the Navy is obviously untrue. Zumwalt has gone far in removing its institutionalized aspects but habit and attitude die hard and discrimination persists at the personal level.

  The report completely ignores a critical dimension to race problems in the services. Young recruits bring with them the trends and attitudes ruling in society, and black separatism has come to the navy just as it has to high schools and universities. This polarization permits individual grievances to escalate quickly into group grievances, and hence troubles. The Navy, however, seems to be dealing with this phenomenon far more effectively than civilian institutions.142

  Timmons noted that the report totally ignored the effects of long deployments in Southeast Asia. “Without building a case, the report concludes that ‘permissiveness’ could be found Navy-wide, yet elsewhere makes the finding that the navy has performed with outstanding combat effectiveness in SEA [Southeast Asia]. Other members of the Armed Services Committee point out that the Zumwalt reforms averted a manpower disaster in the Navy. Yet the report does not even mention the dramatic reversal of reenlistment trends under Zumwalt (10% in 1970, 23% in 1972) and the great improvement of overall morale among both officers and enlisted.”

  The period was a “watershed” in many ways. “When I survived, then the right wingers went in under a rock, and were just kind of sullen, but not mutants for the rest of my watch.” The committee made no recommendation of rebuke for Bud Zumwalt. “I had a nasty month or two, but the giant torpedo that I had feared would blow my policies clear out of the water turned out to be a damp little squib.”143

  With the crisis behind him and the Nixon presidency about to be consumed by Watergate-related issues, Bud penned a handwritten note to Bob McNamara: “Now that the shot and shell of reaction to Navy’s racial episodes have been left astern and with the failure of the effort to convert the word ‘integration’ into a synonym of ‘permissiveness,’ I wanted to let you know again how much I appreciated your thoughtful telephone message of support during the height of the action. I have thought of it, often.”144

  CHAPTER 12

  THE ZUMWALT INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

  If it was a movie, you wouldn’t believe it.

  —RICHARD NIXON, WHITE HOUSE TAPE, DECEMBER 22, 19711

  At the outset of his term as chief of naval operations, Bud had been enthusiastic about the opportunity to be in close consultation with President Richard Nixon and Special Assistant for National Security Affairs Henry Kissinger, the principal actors who formulated and conducted American foreign policy. As naval advisor to the president, Bud anticipated communicating directly with his commander in chief, which Nixon assured him at their first meeting would be standard operating procedure. Within a matter of months, however, Bud realized that he was working for an administration whose style of governance emphasized secrecy, distrust, and back-channel communications. This design represented “the deliberate, systematic and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts of the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of their inner circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national security.”2 Primary among these issues were strategic-arms negotiations with the Soviet Union, termination of the war in Vietnam, and the opening of diplomatic relations with China.

  Bud came to see the modus operandi of the Nixon administration as “divide and conquer the bureaucracy by selectively withholding information.”3 The back-channel style derived from Kissinger and Nixon’s concern with leaks emanating from the bureaucracy. The intent of the back channel was therefore to create a separate channel for communications independent of the Pentagon or State Department. “Essentially, a backchannel is a communication system that seeks to circumvent normal procedures,” wrote Kissinger.4 This mind-set was captured perfectly in two Oval Office conversations. The first was on June 13, 1971, when Kissinger reminded Nixon that “[Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles always used to say that he
had to operate alone because he couldn’t trust his own bureaucracy.” Nixon quickly agreed, saying, “I just wish we operated without the bureaucracy.” While Kissinger laughed, Nixon caught the absurdity of his own comment, interjecting, “We do! Yeah we do, we do, we do.” Kissinger closed by saying, “All the good things that are being done [are accomplished by back channel].”5 In a conversation on December 22, 1971, Nixon told H. R. Haldeman, “I tell you whenever there’s anything important you don’t tell anybody. We don’t tell Rogers, Laird, anybody. We just don’t tell any son-of-a-bitch at all.”6

  As the private channels started paying dividends, documents stamped Top Secret or Eyes Only became the norm. The first private channel had its roots in relations with the Soviet Union, a top priority for Nixon personally. The president instructed Kissinger to open a private channel with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, below the radar of Secretary of State William Rogers. Dobrynin’s daily and routine official contact would be with Rogers, but anything important would be transmitted through Kissinger. In his memoir, Dobrynin noted that this “two-tiered” method of diplomacy seemed strange, especially to his boss, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who did not know which loop Secretary of State Rogers was in, although it was apparent that Rogers was not in the most important one. The private channel paid important dividends in U.S.-Soviet relations by reducing tensions and facilitating agreements over Berlin, Cuba, and the Middle East. President Nixon also utilized the channel to ask for Soviet assistance in pressuring the North Vietnamese in their negotiations to end the war in Vietnam, eventually leading to private talks in Paris between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho.

  The historic 1971 diplomatic breakthrough with China evolved when Pakistan’s president Yahya Khan, architect of the Bangladesh genocide of 1971, offered to serve as Nixon’s secret channel. In November 1970, Khan personally delivered a message to Chinese premier Zhou Enlai relating Nixon’s desire to send an American emissary to China. On July 1, 1971, Kissinger embarked on an elaborately deceptive journey orchestrated by President Khan and code-named Marco Polo in honor of another Western traveler who had journeyed to China. Flying first to Vietnam for consultations in South Vietnam and then to Pakistan for a well-publicized visit, Kissinger developed a “stomachache” at dinner and excused himself. The feigned illness would keep Kissinger in bed for a few days and out of sight of the press. Meanwhile, Kissinger was driven to an airfield in the middle of the night, where a Pakistani jet flew him to China. The world’s press, the U.S. embassy staff, and members of Nixon’s cabinet were kept in the dark about Kissinger’s whereabouts in Beijing.7 For two days, no one, not even the president, knew whether the mission was a success. Only when Kissinger sneaked back into Islamabad was he able to cable the code word “Eureka” to his assistant, Alexander Haig, who called Nixon with the single-word message of success.

  The Pakistani back channel paid such great dividends that “from then on the contacts were kept secret from the Department of State, and indeed from NSC staff members who had no need to know.”8 The bureaucracy would be used for technical expertise but not strategy development. This modus operandi required keeping multiple sets of briefing books. Winston Lord, Kissinger’s special assistant for the China trip, recalled that there were actually three sets of briefing books: “One set for those who were going on to China. . . . Another set were for those knowing that people were going into China, but were part of the cover team staying in Pakistan. . . . And then the third briefing book was for those who didn’t even know there was going to be a China leg.”9

  There were times when the house of cards almost collapsed. At one NSC staff meeting, for example, Melvin Laird’s deputy, David Packard, was sitting next to JCS chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer. He noticed that Moorer’s briefing book contained a document on White House letterhead that Packard knew Laird had never seen. This was because Kissinger didn’t want Laird to see it. The secretary of defense was on the “no need to know” distribution list for that particular White House policy paper. To counter this type of inadvertent error, Kissinger’s staff was instructed that henceforth the White House letterhead was to be removed from documents going to Moorer before photocopying.10 This way, the next time Packard or Laird looked at Moorer’s briefing book, they would not catch any discrepancies. “You can’t have people looking over your shoulder,” said Lord. “You’ve got to hand out the right book to the right person.”11

  Laird, Moorer, and Bud Zumwalt developed strategies for overcoming the back-channel routine, which was leaving them in the dark on critical issues of national importance. For Bud, this began with the practice of what he called Kissingerology, premised on the assumption that he could not believe anything that Kissinger told him and that Kissinger’s assent did not mean that he agreed or intended to do what he said, because it “could very well be a mere ploy to defuse or dismiss me.”12 By the end of his second year as CNO, Bud concluded that if he wanted a voice at the table to advocate for the navy’s political-military policies, he needed an early-warning system to learn what Kissinger was up to. This meant that his relationship with Kissinger was “almost entirely [that of an] adversary.”13

  The practice of Kissingerology was like putting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, taking each piece of human intelligence and analyzing it, just as Sovietologists did in assessing the motives of their adversary. It involved finding out what members of Kissinger’s staff and extended network were up to. A case in point was Seymour Weiss at the State Department, a close confidant of Kissinger. Weiss was a defense and foreign-policy expert known as a hard-liner, who warned against Soviet intentions and cautioned against détente and arms reduction. Bud nurtured a relationship with Weiss and appointed him to a CNO executive panel. Weiss spilled few beans, but when he and others explained administration rationale, “sometimes one learned a little from observing which beans they took the most care not to spill.”14

  SALT was all back channel, and Kissinger “was wholly and unquestionably in command.”15 The back channel “was so far back that neither the members of the U.S. SALT delegation nor even those senior officials who sat on the Verification Panel knew about it.”16 Moorer, Laird, and Zumwalt were on the periphery, “hence, we could not affect those negotiations, which is precisely what Kissinger and Dobrynin intended.”17 Laird told Moorer that “he was really mad as hops that Kissinger had been by-passing him on things.”18

  Bud could always identify the day his relationship with Henry Kissinger started to unwind—Saturday, November 28, 1970, during a train ride returning from the Army-Navy football game. At Bud’s invitation, Kissinger and Nancy Maginnes joined him and Mouza in their special box for the game. It had been a delightful day until the ride home. Bud’s handwritten notes of the conversation offer his account: “K. does not agree with the President that American people can be turned around. He states strongly that the President misjudges the people. K feels that the U.S. has passed its historic high point like so many other civilizations. He believes that the U.S. is on downhill and cannot be roused by political challenge. He states that his job is to persuade the Russians to give us the best deal we can get, recognizing that the historical forces favor them. He says that he realizes that in the light of history he will be recognized as one of those who negotiated terms favorable to the Soviets, but that the American people have only themselves to blame because they lack stamina to stay the course against Russians who are ‘Sparta’ to our ‘Athens.’ ”

  During the ride, Bud challenged Kissinger’s position, saying he could not accept giving the Soviets superior capability in either strategic or conventional fields, believing that the issue needed to be presented to the public. Once the people understood the risks, Bud believed they would approve additional spending to guarantee their survival. Kissinger disagreed. “You don’t get re-elected to the Presidency on a platform that admits you got behind. You talk instead about the great partnership for peace achieved in your term.” When Bud challenged this premise, Kissinger threatened:
“You should take care lest your words result in a reduction in the Navy budget. There are subtle retributions available.”19 It was at this moment that Bud Zumwalt “opted not to be Kissinger’s whore.”20

  The conversation over, Bud went through the train to find Mouza. He told her, “I have seen Henry’s view of the future and I don’t like it.”21 Every instinct and his totality of life experience led Bud to reject a theory that accepted the inevitability of America’s decline. Thinking back to the time following World War II when the United States was scrapping its military strength while the Soviets were on the move in eastern and central Europe, Bud recalled General Marshall’s words at Pinehurst, “Don’t ever sell the American people short. They have vast reserves of hidden strength, ready to use when the crisis is clear.” Bud would not accept Kissinger’s view of American decay. “It was then, I think, that the Kissinger-Zumwalt mutual admiration society began to become unglued.”22

  In retrospect, their friction was based on the simple fact that Kissinger felt the issues involved in strategic-arms reduction were too important to be made public, while Bud felt they were too critical to be decided in secret. Bud wanted to sound a loud trumpet blast to warn the American people of the danger so they would be convinced to support larger military budgets. Kissinger felt that the people would never agree to support an effort to achieve superiority, so it had to be done in secret. Moreover, by going public, the Russians would know the United States was in trouble. Kissinger believed he would lose negotiating leverage. Bud thought that Kissinger’s view sold out the American people by not trusting them and not believing in them. The topic was so important that it needed an open national debate; Bud was willing to trust the judgment of the people to make the right decision. “Kissinger has operated in what I consider to be an immoral fashion in the conduct of his foreign policy, that is, he has not leveled with Congress,” said Bud. “He has deceived important members of the executive branch. I believe that no one, not even the President, is aware of the extent of his commitment to the Russians.”23